j. macgregor wise
arizona state university west
Culture and Technology
24 October 1999


[Paper presented at "Post-Socialist Culture in Global Context," Conference in St. Petersburg, Russia, July 1996]

The question of technology has, within the last decade, been gaining increasing prominence within American cultural studies work. Central to this area of theory and research is the relation between culture and technology, obviously. One of the reasons for the increasing notice of technology within the cultural studies frame is the rise of new computer and information technologies since the late 1970s. These new technologies have transformed or are transforming not only the industrial base of U.S. society but have also generated new spaces of representation: in particular cyberspace. There are many streams of thought and theory we could map here today, from science fiction novels known as cyberpunk, to the cultures of on-line Internet communities, to the theoretical figure/concept called the cyborg. It is this latter concept, the cyborg, that I wish to start with today, because through it I believe we can quickly map out the possibilities of cultural studies work on technology, but we can also begin to trace out some of the fundamental structuring principles of our modern, or postmodern, age.

The cyborg refers to a cybernetic organism, a creature part organic and part artificial. It is a figure frequently found in our science fictions: half-human, half-machine. The figure of the cyborg traditionally was a warning that humans were being taken over by machines, that we are no longer anything but machines. This warning comes out of a tradition, still widely held in society, called technological determinism. This tradition has its roots in the work of Herbert Marcuse, Jacques Ellul, Marshall McLuhan, and others. This tradition argues that societies are completely determined by their technologies, that it is the technologies themselves which decide the shape and character of our societies and lives. According to Jacques Ellul (1964), the driving force behind modern society was called la technique. La technique, rather than being a particular process, product, instrument, or tool, was a set of principles that determined not only the working of our machines, but the processes, institutions, philosophies, and representations of a society. These principles were, in part, that of the criteria of efficiency and progress. As these criteria were used as the operating principles of industry, education, and government, all aspects of social life would come under its influence. The influence of la technique or technicism as a social force can be discerned in Herbert Marcuse's (1964) landmark book, One Dimensional Man, as well as early work in cybernetics and systems theory. The humanist fear of technological determinism in the 1950s and 60s in the United States was driven by the encroaching military industrial state in the 1950s and 60s. In fact, the predominant location for work on cyborgs (apart from science fiction) was, and still is, the military, with its dreams of total surveillance, and of plugging the human soldier into an efficient mechanical system (see Levidow and Robins, 1989; Gray, 1995).

But the figure of the cyborg was re-written in the mid-1980s by sociologist Donna Haraway (1985 [1991]). We are all, to some extent, cyborgs, she argued. If we have any artificial aid (from inoculations to contact lenses to artificial limbs, pacemakers, etc.), we are cyborg. But rather than being frightened by the prospect of becoming cyborg, she saw the possible pleasure of the cyborg. Here was the perfect tool to cross boundaries. Here was a figure, an "ironic political myth," in her terms, that embodied disparate states. Here was a theoretical figure that could prove useful in crossing the politically charged and socially constructed borders between human and technology, between human and animal, between male and female, indeed across any of the constituting binaries of the modern world. Her project was to use the cyborg to undermine these categories, to deconstruct them, and to appropriate the figure of the cyborg for use against the immanent imposition of a grid of control on the planet by the military-industrial state (at the time exemplified by U.S. president Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative).

Her cyborg myth has been the germinal factor in a lot of recent cultural studies work on science and technology which connects her political project up with what has been termed cyberculture, a culture mediated by and informed with new communication and information technologies (cyberspace, computers, new media). For example a new book by Anne Balsamo (1996) uses the figure of the cyborg to examine the gendering of the body in its relations to technologies (from cyberspace to cosmetic surgery, to new reproductive technologies), and the ways women's bodies are placed in relation to technology.

In crossing the borders of the modern binaries, I would argue that the cyborg -- at least as Donna Haraway initially theorized it -- also reconstitutes those boundaries. And this brings me to the second half of my paper. What the figure of the cyborg reveals is the very fundamental structuring principles of the modern age. According to French sociologist of science, Bruno Latour (1991 [1993]), the modern, what it means to be modern, is predicated upon two functions: purification and hybridization. The function of purification is the one that is most noticeable. One of the defining characteristics of the modern is the principle of complete revolution, that modern times are completely, qualitatively different from other times, and that modern people are fundamentally different from other people who are nonmodern (i.e., so-called "primitives"). This function of purification is what produces the binaries that proliferate within modern societies: the radical distinction between the social and the natural worlds (the natural world then becomes but a lifeless resource to be used, in Martin Heidegger's (1977) terms, as a "standing reserve" for industrial society), the fundamental separation between human and technology, etc.

But there is a second function at work in the modern, a function not recognized, indeed often erased by modernists, and that is hybridization. Hybridization is the proliferation of what Latour calls quasi-objects, objects that are both social and natural. There is never any object that is purely social or purely natural, despite centuries of scientists' efforts to label, classify, and purify their object of study. Humans especially are both social and natural. Landscapes, parks, and factories, are both social and natural. In Latour's terms, then, the cyborg is a quasi-object, showing up the process of purification by bringing back to light (forcibly and with political effects -- science is politics by other means, Latour writes) the proliferation of quasi-objects, of hybrids.

This all may be well and good, but what does this mean for cultural studies? I want to answer this question in three parts: first by following Latour's work just a bit further, and secondly, returning to the question of culture and its relation to technology. Finally, I will offer a model that attempts to bypass some of the difficulties brought on by the modern.

Latour (1988) applies his ideas of quasi-objects to the social realm. Our technologies, if we take this argument further, are not alien to us, they are not radically separated from us. They are objects that are both natural and social. Technologies, in his terms, are our lieutenants. They stand in place of (in lieu of) our own actions. We put automatic grooms on doors so we don't have to shut them ourselves once we have gone through. We put up a traffic light so we don't have to have people on the street directing traffic at all hours. Technologies are social actors. They bend space around themselves (Callon & Latour, 1981: 286). They act on the social realm (note that this is not determinism). This technological action could be as simple as regulating how we enter a room (the heft of the spring, the weight of the door, etc.), or adjusting how we enter data into a computer. Latour refers to "the behavior imposed back onto the human by nonhuman delegates" as Prescription (1988, p. 301). Prescriptions can be brought to light by replacing them with sentences: do this, don't do that, move faster, move this way, stop, etc. These are things prescribed back onto us. So we both delegate to technologies and they prescribe back to us. In prescribing behavior (and embodying our delegated behavior), technologies can be said to have a moral and ethical dimension. In short, technologies enculture and are encultured.

Raymond Williams once defined culture as a whole way of life (1963, 312). If so, there is no separating out of culture from technology. Technologies are created within certain cultural contexts which shape their functioning, at the same time they prescribe cultural specificities back on us. Technologies are bound up with the "values, ideas and creative activity" that make up a culture (Pacey, 1983: 5).

We may agree that technologies are an integral part of our societies, and of our lives, and that these technologies are partially social in nature. But this agreement does not get us very far if we are to do cultural studies work. For me, cultural studies is about the theory and study of power, in particular how imbalances in power in society are created, reinforced, maintained, and reproduced through culture. The question that concerns my own work within the project of cultural studies is that of agency -- how are effects accomplished (a process of power) within a particular social configuration?

So, I wish to end with a model of social agency which brings together some of the threads of this paper. I take this model from the work of the late french philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1980 [1987]). Consider the strata in a rock formation. Strata of different composition are folded together. Imagine if one of these strata consisted of technology, thought broadly as corporeal agency -- the ability to achieve effects through physical means, body on body, the direct manipulation of reality. A second strata, folded onto the first, we will call Language, thought of as discursive agency, the ability to achieve effects incorporeally. For example, if a judge declares an accused "guilty," that act has definite effects (the prisoner's status, their ability to move freely or conduct social interactions, is restricted), but those effects were carried out without physical force. The combination, the articulation, of these strata together constitutes human social space. Human agency, the ability of humans to achieve effects in a society, is always both technological and linguistic. What changes from society to society, and across time, is the relative consistency and arrangement of each strata (technologies change, languages evolve) and the relation between the two strata. But we should also have to remember that in any social situation we are dealing not only with human actors (what Donna Haraway refers to as "language-bearing actors" [1991: 3]) but also nonhuman, non-language-bearing actors as well.

So, when a society is in transition, which is what makes this an important consideration here today, what we should look to is how this relationship is changing.

The technological determinists look to change society (or look at society in change) and say that it is the technology which is the prime agent of change which drags human society in its train (Pacey, 1983: 24). Change the technology, change society. But this misses linguistic agency, and the power of technicism, or what has been called linguistic technicism: "the misuse of scientific and technological vocabularies with regards to human activities better described in other ways" (Stanley, 1978, p. xii). Those social constructivists, and those that see the ideological as determining society, focus on linguistic agency (the solutions offered are education and changes in practices of representation). But this ignores the very real hegemonic effects of concrete infrastructures, the prescriptive aspects of our technologies.

The project of cultural studies and technology is then three-fold. One, to examine the changing nature of technology and its concrete and prescriptive effects. What is being encultured in new technologies, and what do new technologies enculture? What social structures and operating criteria are reimposed by continued use of older technologies (i.e., the persistence of what Raymond Williams once called residual cultures [1980])?

Two, examine the linguistic, discursive, conceptual dimensions associated with technology. How does Ellul's la technique create resonances between education, the government, and industry? How would education and ideological work alter the perceptions and uses of technology? How would popular representations accomplish this?

Third, examine the living of these two strata. The relationship between them embodied in everyday life, in habit, and in culture, cultural practices and cultural representations. How does one live one's life within a social space that offers only heavily overdetermined technological agency, while claiming to offer the unlimited freedom to accomplish anything through a new linguistic agency (this is the promise of cyberspace)?

These are the questions I would address. I am here at this conference to learn, to question, and to observe. It is not just a question of the role of new technologies in Eastern Europe and the changing technological and economic infrastructure of these nations, but it is also a question of the ideas, the ideology, the representations, the common sense notions, the advertisements, the beliefs that are also changing. And finally, it is a question of culture, of everyday life, of the living of these changes--and the still active remains of older practices as well.
References
Copyright © 1999 by J. Macgregor Wise